Cholesterol Education Month on September, 2024: Is there such thing as "education month"?

September, 2024 is Cholesterol Education Month 2024. Do You Know Your Cholesterol Levels? - San Antonio Dietetic ... Cholesterol Education

There are actually several "education month" categories throughout the year. Some of them are as follows:

2007

September is National Cholesterol Month

September is National Food Safety Month

May is National High Blood Pressure Month

April is National Mathematics Month

March is Arts Education Month

February is Ethnic and Cultural Heritage Month (some observe this is March)

And if you Google Education Month, you can find dozens more possibilities.

Cholesterol level in a 13 year old?

According to the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) guidelines for children and adolescents, the ranges of total and LDL cholesterol for kids 2 years to 18 years old are:

Category Total cholesterol (mg/dL) LDL cholesterol, (mg/dL)

Acceptable Less than 170 Less than 110

Borderline 170-199 110-129

High 200 or greater 130 or greater

mg/dL = milligrams per deciliter

Children with LDL cholesterol levels 170 mg/dL or greater should receive individual nutritional counseling that focuses on reducing dietary fat and cholesterol and increasing physical activity.

Kids whose results are acceptable should be screened every 3 to 5 years. Those with borderline cholesterol levels should be rechecked in 1 year.

Kids with high cholesterol levels should be rechecked after 3 to 6 months of lifestyle intervention.

Medication may be considered for kids over 8 years old with LDL cholesterol levels of 190 or higher if changes in diet and exercise haven't worked. For kids with additional risk factors, treatment may be considered at even lower levels.

you dont have to be fat or even overweight to have High Cholesterol

it can be hereditary related

Cholesterol Guidelines?

The two guidelines you list are comparable. 65g of fat, at 9 calories/g, is 585 calories, a little below 30% of 2000.

300g of carbs, including the fiber, at 4 calories/g, is 1200 calories, 60% of 2000. The remainder, which can be filled only by protein once fat and carbs have been determined, is 215 calories. As protein is also 4 calories/g, that's just below 54 grams, an amount appropriate for a 54 Kg woman, someone who might be at a stable weight on 2000 calories a day if she exercises enough. It does all add up well enough, the only difference between the two guidelines being that the first one is limiting saturated fat to 15g while the second allows 20g. Maybe there are a few people in the population where such a difference matters. Then again maybe there aren't.

Our need for protein is more often stated as 1 gram per day per Kg of your ideal weight, since that will be a fixed need that doesn't depend on whether your plan is to have your total calories at a level that maintains your weight or reduce them to lose weight. Either way your need to make new structural proteins, enzymes and neurotransmitters is about the same. Actually 1 gram per day, or 70g for an average man who would be 70Kg at his ideal weight, is generous. Kidney patients who need to avoid nitrogen do OK with half this much protein. Some people pile on a lot more protein, but if your body doesn't actually need the excess amino acids, it will be processed for energy much as carbs are, including being converted and stored as fat if your total calories are excessive.

Your protein need is a good place to start in thinking about your diet, since it is fixed regardless of whether or not you need to lose weight. Then you need to decide how many calories you want to take in. Sites like this one:

let you guess at how many calories would keep you at your current weight, given your activity level. If you need to lose weight, a pound of fat is about 3600 calories, extra calories to gain that pound, fewer calories to lose it. So you can decide whether you want to lose 1 or 2 pounds a week and figure a calorie limit for yourself from that.

If you work at this quantitatively for a while, you'll know your real needs better than these estimates. That goes for weight, cholesterol, average blood sugar as reflected by a HgbA1C test, anything. People shout about how the mainstream guidelines should be different in all sorts of directions, about what the perfect mix of protein, fat, and carbs should be. Some say any eggs, red meat, and shrimp are poison. Some go the other way and say limits on fat are part of a Big Pharma conspiracy to put Lipitor in the water supply. You can start anywhere you want, with the guidlines you already have or with the rhetoric of anyone who says they should be different.

One of the beauties of living in the 21st century is that you can test any ideas like these pretty quickly, at least for how they apply to you. Try whatever you like for 6 weeks to 3 months. Then have your doctor repeat your serum lipids, HgbA1C, whatever else and see what happened. Then keep going the same way or try something else. From that I know for myself it doesn't matter at all what my percent of calories from fat are from 20 to 40%. I've never tested 80%. I'll leave that for someone who wants to test that.

I have tested excessive amounts of calories, which isn't about being overweight to a stable degree, but is about actively gaining weight. Whether those calories are carbs or fat, they're going to wind up as fat to be stored somewhere in the body. That was when my cholesterol was the highest, an association I've seen in others as well. For me the best benefit for cholesterol from diet was to go the other way and work back to my ideal weight.

People do vary how much they can affect their cholesterol by diet alone. It's a limited benefit for most people. Apparently genetics is often more important, and any big changes in cholesterol do require medications.

I would start with guidelines you have, try to get to an ideal weight, and see what happens. People try to turn this into a war of words, but as with many things in science, trying something teaches us more than words predicting what should happen. That's especially true when we do it quantitatively.